incoherencies from an american ex-pat in exotic beijing, or: how i learned to stop worrying and love bureaucracy

Firefox and Thunderbird Addons

As I've blogged about before, I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of the Firefox web browsing and Thunderbird email applications. I run them on my Solaris x86 box at work, and my Solaris x86 and MacBookPro systems at home.

And, just for the record, I actually removed the Safari packages from my MBP... it blows me away that Jobs would try to unbundle this POS. "The world's best browser" proclaims their download site... you've got to be kidding...

In any event, I check the addons for Firefox and the addons for Thunderbird on at least a weekly basis, and adjust my configuration at least every couple of weeks.

So, for folks who aren't as inclined to while away their time searching through such things, I figured I'd add a entry to my blog every now and then regarding something cool which I've found.

Honestly, I've just not been happy with other tools I've used to monitor blogs and other pages with dynamic content.

When a page that you've tagged to monitor (right click, Scan Page For Updates...) is changed, an up arrow in the lower right hand corner of the browser's window changes to blue. Clicking on the arrow shows all the pages which you want to scan in a sidebar, with ones with changes highlighted.

Clicking on the below image shows you what happened when my friend Sin-Yaw just updated his blog.

So, there you have it... a really lightweight extension that is effective and easy to use... check it out. :)

You can use it to sort your contacts by the number of messages sent/received (or even their gender or if they are colleagues) and it shows you who you still need to reply to (or who never writes back). Also does some other cute things.